The Devil's Bones

CHAPTER 28

MIRANDA AND I WERE DOWN IN THE BONE LAB-OUR home away from home-huddled over the jigsaw puzzle that had once been a human skull. The cranial vault had been crushed by falling boards as floor joists and rafters had burned through and collapsed into the basement. The two sets of remains didn’t appear to be commingled; luckily for us, the force of the blast had flung the bodies apart rather than together, and since we’d already identified the first skeleton as Billy Ray Ledbetter’s, we were free to concentrate on the second one. But reassembling the second skull was proving to be a herculean task.

We had poured a couple of inches of sand into the bottom of two cake pans. The sand was soft, so it cushioned the fragile skull fragments. It was easy to shape, too, into a depression that matched the curvature of a skull. As we found and fitted together additional cranial fragments, we’d trace a thin line of Duco cement on one edge, press the piece into place, and then nestle it into the sand and look for another match while the glue dried for a minute. It wasn’t as fancy as the high-tech wonder gadgets on television, but it worked. Still, reassembling the skulls out of a heap of tiny shards-none much bigger than my thumbnail-was tedious at best, and I knew there’d come a point at which we simply ground to a halt, unable to find any distinctive edges to match in the tiny bits of bone.

I heard a rap on the steel door. It swung outward, and Steve Morgan walked in. Morgan and I had spoken earlier in the day, as he was headed over to see Garland Hamilton’s dentist and get me Hamilton’s dental records. I was surprised to notice that he was empty-handed.

“Problem with the dentist?” I asked.

“You might say that,” he said. “He died last week. Heart attack.”

I remembered reading a short item in the newspaper, but I hadn’t paid it much attention at the time. “That was Hamilton’s dentist? Dr. Vetter, or some such?”

Morgan nodded glumly.

“How old was the guy?”

“Sixty.”

“Any history of heart disease?”

“You’d have made a good physician,” Morgan said. “Or a good police interrogator. Vetter had a pacemaker put in a couple of years ago.”

“I thought the whole idea of the pacemaker was to prevent a heart attack.”

“Me, too,” he said, “so I called and asked Dr. Garcia that same question. Garcia told me that if your heart stops, the pacemaker will jump-start it. But if your coronary arteries clog up, a pacemaker won’t save you. It’s like getting a new battery for your car-if the fuel line clogs, the battery’s no help.”

“Did Dr. Vetter have partners?”

Morgan shook his head. “Solo practice,” he said. “A hygienist and a receptionist, that was it.”

“Couldn’t one of those get the records for you?”

“Not there to get,” he said. “They couldn’t find the file.”

“Hel-lo,” said Miranda, looking up from her sandbox, “how convenient is that? The dentist codes just before you come calling, and the crucial records vanish into the ether?”

I didn’t like the sound of that much myself. “Did Garcia do an autopsy?”

“No,” said Morgan. “The widow objected. She said he wouldn’t eat right and he wouldn’t exercise. She tried telling him he was headed for a heart attack, but he wouldn’t listen. Sounds like she thinks he got what he had coming to him.”

“Sounds like maybe she’s at the ‘anger’ stage of the grieving process,” I said.

“Sounds like maybe he died in the arms of a girlfriend,” said Miranda. “Isn’t that what tends to send you old codgers over the edge, myocardially speaking? That would explain the heart attack and the widow’s anger.”

“Hey, he wasn’t old,” I squawked. “Sixty is the new fifty-nine.”

“He didn’t die in the heat of passion,” said Morgan. “Not unless the hygienist was under the desk while he was dictating records. The receptionist found him slumped over his desk, microphone in his hand.”

“But he wasn’t slumped over Garland Hamilton’s chart?”

Morgan shook his head again.

“And Hamilton’s dental records are nowhere to be found?”

“Nowhere.”

“Damn,” I said. “That’s going to make it hard to match these teeth. Can you check for other medical records? Any healed fractures we should be looking for? Any cranial X-rays that might show us some teeth?”

“I already left a message for Mrs. Vetter,” said Morgan, “asking for a list of his doctors. I’ll try her again later this afternoon. Sorry for the delay.”

I sighed. “Well, it’s not like we’re sitting here twiddling our thumbs. We’ll be at this for a while yet. As you can see, we’ve got about a thousand more pieces to glue back together.”

“Aha!” Miranda exclaimed. With a pair of tweezers, she reached down and plucked a small fragment of bone from the unmatched pieces. The piece was shaped like the continent of Australia, as were three or four hundred other pieces, as best I could tell. But she tucked it into an Australia-shaped gap in the forehead of the second skull, and it seemed to fit.

“Only nine hundred ninety-nine more pieces,” I said to Morgan. “Better get moving, Steve. Time’s a-wastin’.”

THE PHONE in the bone lab rang just after Morgan left. It was Darren Cash’s boss, District Attorney Robert Roper. “We’re holding a press conference this afternoon at four, but I wanted you to hear this from me first,” he said. “Stuart Latham just pled guilty to murder.”

“First degree?”

“No, second,” he said. “He wanted involuntary manslaughter, but we wouldn’t settle for that.”

“What’s his story? His new one, I mean.”

“He claims they were arguing about selling the farm. They’d both had a lot to drink, and things got out of hand. He hit her, and she fell backward and cracked her head on the kitchen floor. He thought she’d passed out-at least that’s what he claims-and he carried her to the bed. When he woke up the next morning, she was dead. He swears he never meant to kill her, but once he realized she was dead, he panicked.”

“Sure,” I said. “And two weeks ago, he swore he’d kissed her good-bye the morning he caught that plane to Vegas, too. If it was an accident, why’d he plead to second-degree murder, then?”

“Because we had him by the short hairs. It’s possible-barely possible-he’s telling the truth. But even if he didn’t mean to kill her, we could probably convince a jury he did. Besides, even with his new story, we had him nailed on evidence tampering, obstruction of justice, and desecration of a corpse. That last one alone could get him twenty years.”

He didn’t have to remind me of the penalty for mutilating a body-the state legislature had passed that law early in my career, after I’d detailed the way a killer had hacked his victim to pieces, then fed the remains to his Doberman.

“What made Latham start to crack,” Robert continued, “was when Darren told him how he did it-how he put the ice under the car and how many hours that gave him to get to Vegas. Darren showed him pictures of those two little burned circles you found in the grass near the barn.”

Actually, I’d found only one of the two, but I didn’t want to interrupt Roper to correct him.

“Then I took over,” the D.A. went on, “pointing out how those research experiments would be the nail in his coffin on the issue of premeditation.” Roper chuckled. “Hell, I’d no sooner said the words ‘death penalty’ than he started crying and begging to plead out.”

“So how long will Latham serve?”

“If the judge approves the deal, he’ll get a ten-year sentence. Could be out in five.”

“Five years-that’s not much for killing your wife and burning her body,” I said.

“No, it’s not,” he agreed. “But it’s a lot more than zero. And then there’s the fine.”

“What fine?”

“His twenty-five-million dollars that just went up in smoke.”